Mark Fisher and Mark Leckey.pdfMark Fisher and Mark Leckey

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MARK LECKEY

interview By Mark Fisher
http://kaleidoscope-press.com/issue-contents/pop-right-now-bettina-funcke-massimiliano-gioni-and-john-miller-moderated-by-joanna-fiduccia-with-a-postscript-by-boris-groys/http://kaleidoscope-press.com/issue-contents/greg-parma-smith-interview-by-nicolas-guagnini/


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Mark Leckey, Drunken Bakers, video still, 2005


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Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Browns enterprise, New York

MARK FISCHER Maybe we could start off by talking about the role of popular culture in your work. Why do you focus on popular culture?

MARK LECKEY Popular culture is just things that are immediate to me. When I was in college in the 80s, I found everything too detached or ironic,and I didnt want to make work like that; I couldnt make work with a critical disinterestedness. I decided that I should use as material my own historyand background. Fiorucci was a way of digesting things that had happened to me personally, but also a history of where I had come from. I was acasual and a raver, so those are things I can speak of. My show at the Serpentine features a big fridge because thats what is now in my local

environment: domestic appliances. Thats what I have a relationship with now.

MF A lot of your projects could easily be classified as video-essays; they have a story that holds them together, which comes out of research. What doyou think about the relationship between research and art?

ML I slightly despair. I see a lot of student shows now that look like they were put together by librarians. I think the weight of research is outweighingall kinds of artistic concerns at the moment.

MF So its not the research that you don t find interesting; it s when research is a substitute for everything else. What is everything else?

ML Research has to go through a body; it has to be lived in some sensetransformed into some sort of lived experiencein order to become whateverwe might call art. A lot of art now just points at things. Merely the transfer of something into a gallery is enough to bracket it as art. Its kind of weak.


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Mark Leckey, Annarose and Machine, 2010

Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Browns enterprise, New York

MF I sometimes wonder about my own relationship to a lot of this material. As a critic , you sometimes feel that youre being brought in to provide the content, or toprovide the work with consistency that it actually lacks. You can get away with much more in an artwork than you can in a work of philosophy or cultural theory. I thinkthis situation is partly influenced by post-structuralism, which, as I see it, has become a kind of religious piety. The other month, I was speaking to artists, saying thatI believe artists should impose things on their audience. The predictable response to that was, thats a very old fashioned idea of art. I said, well, I think your view isnow old fashionedthe standard, postmodern view that the artist shouldnt oppress people by providing content. Theres this pervasive idea that any kind ofdeterminant statement is oppressive, but how is it art if youre not subjecting people to things in some way?

ML People arent sure about what an image or object is anymore. Theyre not sure how things are fixed or where they belong. If something can be a jpeg online, what


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is it when you print it out and put it up in a gallery? Increasingly, theres this confusion, this anxiety, about the status of things, which seems to feed into what youretalking about. There is a sense that the object and the subject are themselves just nodes or parts of networks of understanding, and that therefore, work can only haveagency or be activated in this networkrather than as an autonomous object. Theres a real fear in that.

MF That becomes an alibi for not producing objects that have any effect. There is an epistemological claimthat the object doesnt exist apart from peoplesrelationship with itand then there s a moral claimthat one shouldnt impose things on people anyway. Given those discourses, its no wonder that artists feelhemmed in and that there s a lot of anxiety.

ML For me, the only way out of this research problem is to proliferate those nodes, to extend them further and further out, so that what you get is a dispersed work.There is no center, and there is no object to look at as such; theres just this nodal network that youre in the midst of. Youre in this expanded field of sculpture thatexists between the material and immaterial realms. That possibility for producing work seems really exciting.


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Mark Leckey, Annarose and leg, 2010Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Browns enterprise, New York

MF There is something interesting about the distributed form. I was thinking of H.P. Lovecraft: theres a sense that his work is not about any one of the stories , butrather about the set of the stories taken together, which composes a world that other writers can then join. The degraded version of that kind of collective fiction isTolkien. This is now a widespread tendency in capitalism: take films, where the tendency is for the film to be at the center of a whole matrix of commodities , ratherthan existing on its own. Film is an interesting model of collaborative art: it opens up the possibility of a post-cinematic, collectively-constituted, genuine, distributedart that has actual content. Thats the difference. A lot of this stuff that youre talking about is distributed form, but the network delivers no content of its own. What ifyou could deliver things in this distributed way, and they actually had content?

ML Well, thats the problem: content is elsewhere. The difficulty in making work now is that theres this model of how a distributed kind of collective work could bemade (i.e., through the Internet), but it cant be made in a gallery. The nature, or structure, of the gallery doesnt allow for that; it needs certain kinds of forms, certainobjects. Theres this term I like, stigmergy: an ant goes out, lays a path of pheromones; the other ants follow that path, and then that path gets built up until itbecomes a pathway. They use this term in open source to describe a programming language that has being continually added to and amended so that the original codehas been lost or forgotten, but youre left with a structure that everyone can use. As an idea of making art, that seems really interestingsomething made with thebenefits of technology. At the same time, that idea is a long way from the art being made now, and a long way from Benjamins idea of arts aura. The aura is stillthere; it still surrounds artworks, massively. The trouble is that more you start to distribute art or disperse it, the more mutable art becomes, until finally, it dissipatesinto just LOLCats or something.


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Mark Leckey, LondonAtella, video still, 2002Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Browns enterprise, New York


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MF Weve seen a lot of this rhetoric around student protests. A lot of the discourse surrounding those protests is naive regurgitation of 90s cyber-rhetoric: concentration is bad; distribution is good. I think we re beyond a stage where that works anymore. Its quite clear that distribution is ourcondition. Its neither good nor bad: it s just how things are. Actually , ill go further than that: you can have things that are top-down and distributive.

ML I see a lot of the stuff on the Internet as a realization of ideas from 80s rave culture.

MF In the sense of?

ML In the sense that the Internet allows concentrations of things to manifest, to self-generate or come together into some kind of body.

MF I get it, but i think concentration has gone against the dominant tendencies of the internet.

ML No, I dont think it has. Were so immersed in these new networks; were so dispersed, and we havent figured out a way to concentrate. Thats thepoint of this argument: you have to consciously make a body out of these things. There has to be a program in art-making and in politics, and we have togather these things together. I still think that the Internets technological possibilities allow for that, more so than ever.

MF I think thats the crucial distinction that youve made, between the idea that the internet by itself will deliver this and the idea that you need, not acritical relation to it, so much as a practical orientation.

ML Or historical.


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Mark Leckey, LondonAtella, video still, 2002Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Browns enterprise, New York

MF Given that the prevailing ideological currents are individuating, the tendency has been for the internet to invent new forms of solitudeaconnective solitude. People are realizing that you can use the internet to do other things , but you have to get outside of it first, to instrumentalize it instead


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of being instrumentalized by it.

ML This is the frustration I have with the art world at the moment. I want to say that theres a lack of historical materialism, but maybe thats tooloaded. Theres just a lack of personal history, an understanding of lived experience. In art schools now, you finish your B.A., you do an M.A., and thenyou go straight into a gallery system. So its hard to talk about having an experience outside of the art world, but it seems entirely necessary. There has tobe something else beyond art practice.

MF Were talking about the general crisis of concentration.

ML Its an erasure of the existential subject, twentieth-century man. The current state of technology denies you that kind of crisis; instead, you haveanother kind of existential crisis, and have to accept yourself as a networking social creature, which is quite at odds with the individual, self-actualizing,Thatcherite-being youd always supposed yourself to be.

MF For me, the issue is thresholds, not frames. It seems to me that art could learn a lot from theme parks or video games . Instead of providing thisneutral space, which no one knows what to do with anymore , art spaces could be constructing thresholds into a place where, like in a video game,

everything in the space is significant.

ML Thats the expanded field of sculpture. That is what I was going to say before about the desire to be immersed in things. There is a melancholicdesire to be in an image, which is really promising and maybe realizable in some three-dimensional, televisual way. I think part of this desire is a sense ofseeking out an expanded sculpture, which includes the concentration we were speaking about as well. It is a lot easier to get your head around thesethings if you think of sculpture rather than framing, because you can step into a sculpture. I think thats what art needs: something that you can get inside.

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Issue 11, Mark Fischer, Mark Leckey

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Mark Fisher and Mark Leckey.pdfMark Fisher and Mark Leckey